


a once powerful mad American locomotive

by a_good_soldier



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (Referenced) - Freeform, Episode: s13e06 Tombstone, First Kiss, Fluff, Human Castiel (Supernatural), Introspection, M/M, Post-Canon, Stargazing, vaguely Dabb-era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29932113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_good_soldier/pseuds/a_good_soldier
Summary: Cas likes it when the sun gets low, turns the sky pink. He’ll spend hours out there, sitting and watching as the wind blows spirits into the tall grass and the clouds turn yellow and purple and then blue, and then when nighttime comes, Cas tilts his head back and looks at the stars.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 96





	a once powerful mad American locomotive

**Author's Note:**

> title from Ginsberg's [Sunflower Sutra](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49304/sunflower-sutra) & def inspired by [this wonderful gifset](https://hotniatheron.tumblr.com/post/642878642893078528/you-were-never-no-locomotive-sunflower-you-were)

Cas likes it when the sun gets low, turns the sky pink. He’ll spend hours out there, sitting and watching as the wind blows spirits into the tall grass and the clouds turn yellow and purple and then blue, and then when nighttime comes, Cas tilts his head back and looks at the stars.

Dean watches him when he does it sometimes. Got him in a panic the first few times, thinking Cas had gone out and hadn’t come home — but there he was, right where Dean left him, head tilted back. It’d been cold out. Dean had shrugged off his flannel and walked up to set it on him like a blanket instead of launching it at him from the doorway, and Cas had turned that wondering face onto him, eyes wide and full of stars. Hadn’t needed to say thank you, but said it anyway. Dean had left him to it.

This time around, Dean leans against the bunker’s back door, the one hidden under a mess of brush so dense they didn’t make it until years after they’d moved in. Seven, eight feet in front of him, Cas is settled with his hands on his stomach and that head of his tilted up, the line of his Greek nose elegant and strong.

“Would you like to join me, Dean?” Cas asks eventually, once the sun is all the way under and the half moon lights his cheekbones. They were at a diner a few days ago and Dean remembers that he’d looked around and thought, _Don’t they realize? Can’t they see it, the angel in him?_

The blanket twists in his grip. “M’good over here, bud,” Dean replies, chickening out. He huddles into his sweater. Cold doesn’t seem to bother Cas unless he lets it, or unless it’s real bad, snow coming down enough to make Dean anxious about taking Baby out. “You doin’ okay?”

“Yes.”

That seems to be it. Cas closes his eyes. In a stroke of courage or impulse, Dean — God, he’s got no self-control — walks forward. Makes it two feet closer. Cas’s cheeks are red from the slight chill in the air, and his breath comes out in long, gentle streams. A smile twitches at the corner of his mouth, and Dean knows he’s been made.

“There is another seat somewhere around here,” Cas says, cracking open one eye to size him up. “You don’t have to stand there.”

“I, uh.” Christ. Dean clears his throat, and pulls the blanket out from behind his back, the one he hasn’t had the guts to bring out until tonight. “Figured I’d maybe. It’s warm enough, y’know, might lie back, take it in.”

Cas opens his other eye. “That’s a wonderful idea, Dean.”

“Right.” Dean nods, and sets the blanket down, a respectable three feet away from Cas’s feet. He lies back, trying to be nonchalant. Puts his hands behind his head.

It really is something. The longer he looks, the more he realizes — this used to be better for Cas. He could zip around from one of those glowing pinpricks to the next like walking next door. Now he sits on a broken lawn chair in the middle of nowhere, where the Kansas plains seep into Nebraska, and strains his neck just to see them.

“You ever miss ‘em?” Dean asks, like a fucking idiot.

He doesn’t see Cas, doesn’t watch the expression that slides onto his face at that. Just imagines it. Imagines Cas’s mouth twisting, imagines his brows furrowing as he considers that. _Yes_ , he thinks of Cas saying, _but I gave them up for you_. As if Dean wants to hear that.

Eventually, Cas says, “Sometimes.”

Dean lets it lie. Not his place to ask for more, not when he’s the reason— when Cas keeps saying Dean’s the reason Cas is flightless. Cas says it like a compliment but Dean knows the truth.

“I miss many things about being an angel,” Cas continues, and Dean’s heart clenches. “But… I’m happier now. It’s— I didn’t even know to be happy. I couldn’t have told you what it was to feel pleased or displeased by one thing or another. It’s impossible to overstate the vastness of your influence on me, Dean.”

Yeah. All right. Dean looks up at the stars. Would it have been better, to zap from one to the next like a bee from flower to flower, without being able to appreciate it? Is it better to know what you’ve lost only after you’ve lost it?

“How’s your neck?” Dean asks gruffly, tilting his own head back to look up at Cas, because he can’t think of anything to say to _the vastness of your influence on me_. “If you’re— don’t hurt yourself, man. You can, y’know, if you want.” He pats the blanket beside him, because he can’t say the words. Imagine it. Dean, asking, _You wanna lie down next to me and look at the stars?_

Cas stands up. Dean watches him stretch. Watches him roll his neck, pop the bones of his wrists loudly. And then Cas’s body blocks out the stars, just for a second, as he hovers over the blanket.

Dean doesn’t say a word. Just watches him. Keeps his eyes on him as Cas toes off his shoes to step onto the blanket, feet next to Dean’s hips, and then sits down, cross-legged. Cas keeps looking at Dean, like he’s just as interesting as the sky above.

Dean’s gaze catches on Cas’s jawline, then falls to his throat, then his hands. “You, uh. You gonna look at the stars?”

Cas exhales. “Yes,” he says, and Dean turns his eyes back to the safely distant galaxies as Cas settles down next to him, warm and familiar and dangerously close.

Dean breathes in. It always smells so strongly of grass and fresh soil out here in the summer, something about the sun resurrecting all the bugs and leaves and flowers that hunker down in the winter. Cas is human now, or close enough, but he still— some days, less often as time goes by, he’ll flinch from his usual morning omelette, more molecules than food. Dean wonders what he senses out here. If he can hear the bugs rustling in the grass, the hawks killing bunnies miles away. If it’s too much or not enough, being what Cas is.

Dean cants his eyes left. Like always, his gaze catches on all the parts of him, on Cas’s jawline, his inevitable stubble, that quietly noble profile of his. He swallows. _I’m your Huckleberry_ , he remembers, incongruously, and almost laughs— the idea that Cas, Castiel, an angel of God, let Dean put a plastic dollar store cowboy hat on him. That Cas let Dean put him through a Western marathon on Dean’s memory foam mattress, squinting at Dean’s too-small laptop screen, eating day-old pizza out of the box.

He looks back up. If Cas were one of those stars, a thousand light years wouldn’t be enough to keep them apart. He remembers the way he’d felt when Cas was back, walking on that Dodge City highway under that high noon sun, when just the week before he’d shoved a needle in his heart and hoped he wouldn’t wake up. He can’t lose him again. He won’t.

Cas’s hand comes up and over, suddenly — but gentle, always gentle with him — to rest on Dean’s belly. It’s a soft weight through his shirt. “Cas?”

“My hand is cold,” Cas says. Dean turns to look at him and there’s Cas looking back. Always looking back at each other, the two of them are. Orpheus and Lot’s wife and all the rest of them have nothing on Dean and Cas.

Dean swallows. Cas is so close to him. His eyes are so blue. Dean— he brings his hand up, shaky, covers Cas’s hand with his own. “You’re— _really_ cold,” Dean realizes, looking down as he wraps Cas’s hand in both of his. It’s so— he’s so delicate, Dean just wants— and he can’t stop it, he can’t, his thumb brushes across a tendon and Cas shivers.

He blinks back up at Cas, who is staring at him. “Sorry,” Cas whispers, voice cracking. He swallows. Dean watches it all, the movement of his throat, the clench of his jaw.

Cas doesn’t say anything else, though, so Dean— Dean risks it. He thumbs slowly across the small dip in Cas’s wrist, feels Cas’s skin prickle under his touch. He slides his hand up Cas’s forearm, reaches his elbow.

“You comfortable, Cas?” Dean asks, because he can’t ask anything else. He doesn’t know how to ask for what he really wants to know.

Cas nods silently, and Dean pushes further, palm catching on Cas’s skin until his fingertips hit the seam of his T-shirt sleeve. Dean curls his hand around Cas’s shoulder, fingers trailing under the shirt, inside and intimate. He exhales. “Cas—” he says, and then shakes his head. Suddenly, the back of his neck prickles with shame. What could there be to say, why ask for anything more when— when Dean’s fucked it up so many times by saying the wrong thing, when Cas is here now and that ought to be good enough for him—

“I’m here,” Cas says, and Dean exhales. Yeah. Cas is here. And after all of it — after years, years and years of losing him — he isn’t leaving. Cas’s hand — the one connected to the arm Dean’s feeling up right now — comes to settle on Dean’s hip. They’re curled into each other, legs just shy of touching each other and now that Dean’s thinking of it he can’t _stop_ thinking of it, Cas’s knees unbearably close to knocking against Dean’s, the heat of his thighs a dangerous temptation.

Dean bites his lip. He’s old, now, older than most in his line of work get. He ought to have the balls to figure it out. He knows what this looks like. And maybe that’s what it is, but—

Before he has to make a decision, though, Cas’s hand tightens, just a bit, just enough for Cas to pull, and yeah Dean could resist but hell, why should he? So Dean lets Cas pull him in close, lets Cas roll them both over until Dean’s leaning on his forearms on either side of Cas’s head, looking down at him, at that face, at Cas looking at Dean the same way he looks at the stars. “Cas,” he whispers, leaning in until his forehead touches Cas’s. “What the hell are we doin’ here?”

“Whatever we want, I suppose,” Cas replies. Dean looks at him. He’s smiling, wider than anything, wider than the first time he saw a shooting star as a human, delighted by the fact that he could still see them, that humanity hadn’t taken wonder from him. _In fact, everything seems bigger, and more mysterious_ , Cas had said, like it was a good thing.

Dean wants to be worth that smile. “Well, hell, Cas, if that’s all,” he jokes quietly, barely hearing himself. Just thinking about it. About where he is — out here on the plains where there’s nobody to look at him at all. Nobody to see the way his knees tremble on either side of Cas’s broad thighs, to see the way his head dips lower and lower, to see Cas tilt his chin up, to see Dean close his eyes.

Cas brings his hand up from Dean’s hip to the back of his neck to pull him in that half inch, as if Dean needs any convincing at all. Not here, not now. And they’re kissing. Dean thinks he might be sweet on Cas — might’ve been for a while, actually. Stupid as shit, that he hadn’t figured it out until just now, because now it’s everything in the world, Cas’s mouth and the warmth of his chest under Dean’s chest and his fingernails scratching gently in Dean’s hair.

“Shit,” Dean murmurs, kissing him again, just for the feel of it, just to feel Cas’s mouth open for him, generous, the drag of his lips against Dean’s more electric than all the most obscene things Dean’s ever done in his whole life put together. He inhales shakily, huffs out, “Jesus, Cas,” and then leans in to kiss him again.

Cas breathes into Dean’s mouth, tugs gently at his lower lip with his teeth, and it’s— Dean collapses, full on, lets Cas carry his weight. Cas doesn’t say anything at all. Dean doesn’t, either — like their script has run out. Like there’s no race left to run, no audience to entertain.

Dean closes his eyes, and puts his face in the crook of Cas’s shoulder, breathes him in. What else is there to say? They’re doing whatever they want.


End file.
